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SATA port add-on card

michaelpwilson · 2011-03-18 16:21:41

Hi there, I'm trying to find a PCIe card that will allow me to increase the number of SATA ports on my desktop. I already have 10 SATA ports (6 on the motherboard, 4 on a Promise SATA300 TX4 card). However, now I have more SATA devices than ports, and I'd like to increase them. My question is, does anyone know of a card…

18-03-2011 4:21pm

#1

michaelpwilson

Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 51 ✭✭

Join Date: October 2001

Posts: 39

Hi there, I'm trying to find a PCIe card that will allow me to increase the number of SATA ports on my desktop. I already have 10 SATA ports (6 on the motherboard, 4 on a Promise SATA300 TX4 card). However, now I have more SATA devices than ports, and I'd like to increase them.

My question is, does anyone know of a card that will give me more SATA ports than the 4 that my Promise card does?

I must stress that I am not interested in RAID of any description - striping, mirroring, and spanning are of no interest to me. Some of the SATA drives I want to connect already have data on them, and I do not want to have to reconfigure the drives in setting up a RAID array or anything of that nature.

Ideally, I would like to replace my Promise SATA card with another PCIe SATA card which has 10 or more SATA ports (or mini-SAS ports which could convert to SATA ports) with compatibility for SATA capacities of 3 TB and greater with 6 Gb/sec throughput as in SATA-III, although I would settle for SATA-II and a 2TB limit if that is my only option. I hear that even using a RAID card in JBOD mode involves reconfiguring the drives and I don't want to do this. Having said that, if there is a RAID card that can be used in such a way that I can plug in my SATA drives as-is without any reconfiguration whatsoever then I would be interested in this.

Obviously I do not want to go the route of simply plugging in external drives via USB/e-SATA. I have a large tower machine and I want to use the available space inside it, avoiding having lots of external boxes and hubs. Nor do I want to use a docking station and plug in the drives as I need them, as the ports on the back of the drives have a limited insertion/ejection life.

I have already contacted Promise, Supermicro, Adaptec, and a few other manufacturers regarding my requirements but to date have had no luck. Apparently my specification is too arcane. Can anyone here with a knowledge of storage systems give me some advice? Thanks in advance!

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